David Ayer’s Suicide Squad was such a disaster that it’s hard not to see that “the” in the title of its follow-up as a tell that writer-director James Gunn is looking to completely wipe the 2016 film from our collective memory. If so, he may just succeed at that task. Besides, the premise of The Suicide Squad, of disposable supervillains being enlisted for black-ops missions, makes the film less of a sequel than a new iteration of a core idea.
From the outset, Gunn evinces a significantly greater grasp of the comedic and political possibilities of the DC property than Ayer did by going so far as to set up the film’s narrative by more or less staging a version of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The dubiously superpowered members of the Suicide Club are sent by the U.S. government to the Latin American nation of Corto Maltese, whose pro-American dictator has just been overthrown by a nationalistic coup, and their mission goes as immediately and farcically wrong as the real Bay of Pigs.
After the invasion, which leaves a number of our antiheroes brutally dispatched, the film settles on Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and a new cast of oddball characters that includes sharpshooter assassin Bloodsport (Idris Elba, conspicuously channeling Will Smith’s Deadshot from the first film), the ironically dubbed jingoist Peacemaker (John Cena), the rodent-controlling Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior), the unbelievably baffling Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), and a giant talking shark named Nanaue (Sylvester Stallone). This crew, far stranger than the first film’s lineup, benefits immeasurably from the humor of Gunn’s screenplay, which trades Ayer’s lazy racial stereotypes and action-movie clichés for a nastier vein of sarcasm than he could get away with in his PG-13 Marvel movies.
Largely eschewing the MCU’s overreliance on pop-cultural references, which defines even his own Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Gunn opts for caustic exchanges that filter contemporary blockbuster banter through an ethos closer to the racier tone of 1980s buddy films. Throughout The Suicide Squad, it feels as if there’s a real and consistent tension amid all of the back and forth, and, admirably, the filmmaker walks a tightrope of self-awareness without slipping into the enervating meta-humor that marked Deadpool and its sequel.
More delightfully, Gunn uses the film’s R rating as an excuse to get back to his Troma roots, rendering the half-grim, half-absurdist nature of the Suicide Squad as a property with delightfully bloody abandon. Much of the film’s action, though embellished with computer effects for the more elaborately powered characters, exudes a refreshing physicality, right down to the use of actual blood squibs instead of the animated blood that has become de rigueur in superhero films for practical purposes. The camerawork for these scenes is coherent, if not remarkably fluid, and the extensive stuntwork grounds even the inevitable final-act turn toward the CGI spectacular that all superhero movies become in the last 25 minutes.
There are times, though, when Gunn’s film visibly pulls its punches. Its exploration of off-the-books American interventions hedges far closer to actual social commentary than all but one or two of Marvel’s Pentagon-approved movies. It even makes a far clearer case for the government head of the Suicide Squad program, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), as being one of the few truly unnerving and reprehensible villains in superhero movies to date. But because The Suicide Squad is a superhero movie, it’s not enough for the team to merely destabilize a foreign country, and the shift to dealing with a piece of deadly biotechnology causes the film’s critique of American postcolonial foreign policy in and out of focus.
Elsewhere, in one of the film’s most brutal, incisive scenes, the squad viciously tears through a village of armed locals without bothering to find out whether or not they even support the new regime. But the vicious satire is undercut immediately by the survivors of the massacre completely moving past their trauma for the sake of fighting the “real” enemy.
Nonetheless, The Suicide Squad is, following Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey and Zack Snyder’s Justice League, another exciting triumph for the once beleaguered DCEU. And because Gunn has now made movies for both of the Big Two comics companies, one can finally properly evaluate the argument that Warner Bros. gives its filmmakers greater leeway than Disney. Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies are two of the most distinctive and entertaining MCU entries to date, but The Suicide Squad, with its gory action and cutting satire, truly feels like a statement of his vision in all of its untrammeled, compelling garishness.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
